In recent years there has been extensive growth in VMS use in corporations and other enterprises. It is generally desirable to provide secure remote access to an enterprise VMS, in order to accommodate those users who may be traveling, telecommuting or otherwise in a location remote from the enterprise itself. For example, such users will generally want to be able to access the enterprise VMS from a mobile client device, such as a mobile telephone or personal digital assistant (PDA).
One type of conventional approach to providing the above-noted remote access does not supply received message notifications to remote users. Instead, a user must frequently call in to access his or her voice mailbox on the enterprise VMS in order to determine if any messages have been received. Clearly, such an approach is inconvenient for the user.
There are also a number of notification-enabled approaches. For example, a user may be notified via an e-mail message or a short message service (SMS) message when a new voice message arrives for that user in the VMS. However, with this approach the user generally still has to dial the telephone number of the enterprise VMS in order to access the received voice message. This can be very cumbersome, particularly when the remote user is in transit and equipped with only a simple mobile device having a small keypad. Other notification-enabled approaches are more sophisticated, and upon notification may allow the user to access the VMS via a web page or other type of direct connection. However, these more sophisticated arrangements often require special purpose hardware, such as a complex telephony server or a special type of mobile device, and are generally not designed for single-key access to the VMS from the mobile device.
It is apparent from the foregoing that a need exists for improved techniques for voice message notification and retrieval for mobile users.